Relationship Breakthrough: How To Create Outstanding Relationships in Every Area of Your Life - Hardcover

Madanes, Cloe

 
9781605295817: Relationship Breakthrough: How To Create Outstanding Relationships in Every Area of Your Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1605295817 ISBN 13: 9781605295817
Verlag: Rodale Pr, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Everyone faces the challenges of making relationships work. Whether with spouses, family members, friends, lovers, or colleagues, relationships have the power to make one feel happy, frustrated, or miserable. In Relationship Breakthrough, Cloe Madanes—an expert in creating healing, empowering relationships—gives readers vital tools to transform their relationships and their lives.
Madanes's cutting-edge methods produce real results and create rewarding, sustainable relationships. Using simple, step-by-step exercises and drawing on the examples of clients who have benefited from this technique, Relationship Breakthrough teaches readers how to:
- overcome life's inevitable losses
- resolve long-standing family conflicts
- synchronize their needs with those of others
- create outstanding relationships in every area of their lives
This is the only book that ties the guiding principles of Tony Robbins's work with Cloe Madanes's revolutionary approach to relationship therapy. Our connections with the people in our lives have the capacity to bring us great joy, if only we understood the fundamental needs we all have, but sometimes express differently. Drawing on her trademark wisdom, empathy, and extensive clinical experience, Madanes shows readers how to better understand their own needs and those of others, bringing clarity and insight into any relationship.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CLOE MADANES is an internationally regarded innovator in family therapy. She is the author of five books that are classics in the field: Strategic Family Therapy; Behind the One- Way Mirror; Sex, Love and Violence; The Secret Meaning of Money; and The Therapist as Humanist, Social Activist and Systemic Thinker. She is the cofounder of the Robbins-Madanes Center for Strategic Intervention, dedicated to promoting harmonious relationships within the family, the community, and in larger social systems. She lives in La Jolla, California.

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Chapter 1

WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?

Not much in life compares with the feeling of being a We, not just an I, of giving and receiving love freely, of being part of a team. The varieties of such relationships are legion: between spouses, lovers, parents and children, siblings, relatives, intimate friends, co-workers, neighbors. It is the feeling we get when we know someone is helping us "pull the wagon" in an endeavor, when someone "has our back." There is immense joy in a happy, permanent relationship. Most of us want nothing more than a permanent bond with someone we love. Yet so often our relationships go bad, and we don't know how to turn them around.

We all want the perfect relationship; alas, there is no such thing. Relationships are messy. It's how we deal with the messiness that makes the difference between a relationship filled with passion, growth, depth, and joy, and one that is mired in negative patterns of anger, blame, and boredom. A good relationship--whether with a partner, child, friend, or family member--is one of life's greatest gifts, and there's no reason to settle for anything less. When problems and conflicts arise, I counsel against exchanging one relationship for another, like a Christmas gift we take back for a store credit in hope of finding that thing we desire most. I believe most troubled relationships can be transformed into satisfying, rewarding ones. Simply falling into a great, long-lasting relationship is about as rare as finding a gold coin on the street. Good relationships take work, but we all have the capacity to create joyful, lasting, deeply satisfying connections in our lives.

Relationships are not always what they appear to be. A submissive wife may actually dominate her husband, even though he is the one who appears dominating. A loving husband may only get angry responses from his wife-- could his loving behavior possibly be the cause of her anger? How do we understand cause and effect in relationships? What are the sources of power that one person has over another? When we overcome a challenge, are we creating new problems? Is it possible to plan what will happen in relationships?

The first step to changing a dysfunctional or unsatisfying relationship is to change our focus--to look underneath the obvious problem and focus on our underlying needs.

It's Likely You Created the Problem You Are Trying to Solve

It is human nature that when faced with difficulties in a relationship, we tend to blame the other person.

"If my husband were not so rigid in his views about everything, then we could communicate. He becomes judgmental even before I can express myself!"

"I walk on eggshells around my son for fear that anything I might say could produce an emotional outburst!"

"He is so critical of everything I do! I am never good enough for him."

"Her hostility is out of control. The moment she opens her mouth, I expect to be attacked."

"He wants me to do everything for him, just like his mother did."

These are common complaints in relationships. They could have been expressed by a spouse about the other spouse, by a parent about a child, or by a child about a parent. The typical belief is that if only the other person would change, the relationship would be much better. And so people get stuck in patterns of blaming one another.

Most of us see ourselves as innocent bystanders in our relationships. The way we are seems totally unrelated to how others behave. Reality, of course, is quite different. We tend to only see things from our own point of view. We tell ourselves a story about "us," and this story can be very different from reality. Even though we prefer to deny it, we know that in relationships everything is interaction and that our behavior provokes a response in the other and that response in turn provokes a reaction and so on.

For example, if a wife expresses an outrageous view, the husband might respond with a cautious, conservative opinion, which she will then criticize, and he will respond by becoming even more rigid in his view. It's often difficult to determine what came first--her outrageousness or his rigidity.

Wife: I'm going to get the new Volkswagen Rabbit. I love the shape and the colors!

Husband: We need to look at the safety and consumer ratings before we make a decision.

Wife: You're so boring! Buying a car is like buying a dress; it's the shape and the color that matter.

Husband: We are not buying a new car this year. We simply can't afford it.

In every situation, we make three unconscious decisions: what we focus on, what it means to us, and what we should do to create the results we desire. While the wife was focusing on the pleasing aesthetics of the car, the husband was focusing on safety and performance ratings and finances. By changing her mental framework, her point of view, the wife might have changed her husband's reactions. If she had taken into account the sorts of concerns she knew her husband would focus on, she might have presented her desire differently.

If the wife had said, "I'm thinking of getting the new Volkswagen Rabbit. I love the shape and the colors, and I think it has great ratings," the husband's response might have been different. Likewise if the husband had replied to her first statement with "I like the shape and the colors, too. Let's look up the ratings," the wife might not have immediately jumped to the conclusion that her husband was boring.

A simple change of focus can immediately change a habitual mode of conflict.

Attempted Solutions May Sustain a Problem Instead of Resolving It

Sigmund Freud observed that people tend to repeat the same behaviors over and over again, even when those behaviors make them unhappy. He was interested in how people make the same mistake repeatedly, even when knowing that they are making a mistake. For example, a woman falls in love with a man, and soon she becomes emotionally dependent on him and demanding. He feels stifled and leaves her. She then falls in love with another man. Again she becomes dependent and demanding, again he leaves her. Freud called this the repetition compulsion.

Charles Darwin had already observed that the survival of a species might be threatened by its inability to abandon what at one time was an optimal adaptation. When a creature stubbornly maintains the same behavior in the face of a changing environment, survival is at risk. Yet changing habitual patterns can be very difficult to do, as everyone knows who has tried to abandon a bad habit or get someone else to do so.

Every marital therapist has struggled with spouses who think they have an optimal solution to their spouse's bad behavior. A typical issue for wives is the husband's sloppiness. The idea that husbands are sloppy might sound like a stereotype, but I reference it because often it is a problem in many relationships.

A conversation might go like this:

Wife: I get upset and yell at my husband when he leaves a mess in the kitchen.

Therapist: Does yelling work, or does he do it again? Wife: He does it again.

Therapist: So then what do you do?

Wife: I yell louder.

Therapist: Does it work?

Wife: No.

Therapist: Perhaps it's time to stop doing what doesn't work and try something different.

It's remarkable how difficult it is to abandon an attempted solution that we believe will work, but time and time again doesn't. Not only is the solution not abandoned; it is often intensified or embellished. By attempting to perfect the solution, we can become blind to other strategies for change that may be available to us at any time. And to change, we need to shake up our old patterns of behavior, to think out of the box.

The inability to change the way we attempt to solve a problem can prove to be fatal to a...

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Verlag
Rodale Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1605295817
ISBN 13 
9781605295817
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
234
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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